And so onward
I hit the halfway at 2:27:42. With a little luck, I could still beat five hours. The 4:45 on my back was pretty well out of reach unless there was a miracle tailwind in Harlem, but first I had a more immediate problem. I had to find a place to go.
It is not true that if you just keep running the urge will go away. I've found that out the hard way while training. Maybe it's being 60, but once the urgency arrives, you had better find a facility.
So, I wasted ten minutes or more, stopping at two separate rows of porta-potties to find thirty or more runners already waiting,(what a bunch of drinkers we runners are!) Some people took matters into their own hands.
But, even though I was tempted by the fences and the warehouse walls, I kept looking and trotting along finally spotting a nearly out-of-sight row of porta-johns with only TWO people waiting ahead of me.
The relief was great but all the stopping, the waiting, the cussing out of oneself for being so dumb, took something out of me besides the liquids.
It took me about a mile to get warmed up again and that brought me to the foot of the Queensboro Bridge.
We run across it's two mile span on the lower level instead of on top where there's a view. Part of the trek across you are in total darkness. I had to take my sunglasses off just to make out the shapes of the runners ahead and beside me. Somewhere about the middle we were all passed by two motorcycles with lights and sirens leading a mini-ambulance. It kind of sent a shudder through the crowd. Soon though, I was nearing the west end of the bridge and I could hear the shouts of the crowd down below us on First Avenue. I hoped that the storied "charge" that the runners get on making that final turn into Manhattan would hit me good.
Well, something hit me. The crowds were loud and there was, I admit, a burst of energy in me, but it only lasted a short while. What hit me was, unlike almost all of the rest of the course, First Avenue is a long, LONG, straight-as-a-yardstick, run. And, unlike the the streets of Brooklyn, there are no distant landmarks you can hang your mind on, no "I just need to get to that church steeple way up there" to help you tick off the distance. It becomes a long sojourn through similar block after similar block.
A real help @ the 19 mile mark was the PowerBar Chocolate gels they were giving out. Now, I had been eating a few of these chocolate Refuels during training and, to say the least, they tasted like mud. Sweet mud, but mud nonetheless. Now, at 19 miles and having had only one Tri-berry gel for breakfast (you remember I forgot to eat my bagel) and three orange gels so far in the race, I was looking forward to having something chocolate. Well, YUMMMYY!!!! That gel tasted so good, Godiva good, with just a hint of hazelnut aftertaste. My mouth just exploded with tastebud joy. I wished I had snagged a couple more. That's when I knew I was losing it. Nothing in a gel pack had tasted that good in training. It had to be some kind of cosmic joke or I was having a sensory fit. I said to myself "You could eat real mud right now and it would taste Godiva good." That made me laugh and I felt better and knew that nothing was going to stop me now.
I began to see people that I had seen at the start. The two Italians in their green and red on white, I saw a married couple who had been with me by the buses, he's a six footer, she's maybe five one. They had "I'm her husband." and "I'm his wife." on their shirts with arrows pointing in the direction of one another. I didn't think it would be possible for two people so different in size to run that far together, but there they were at 19 miles plus. He was hurting and she was chatting away like a little bird. There was the blind runner being aided by his sighted partner. There's a commitment for you. Lead a blind runner for 26 miles through the crowds and the potholes and the Gatorade cups. There's a commitment for you. Run 26 miles through the five boroughs of New York while blind. All I had to do was run.
Hundreds of people were walking by the time I got to 125th. I was looking ahead for the Willis Ave Bridge. I wanted to see how close I was to four hours on the road. As I hit the corner at the entrance into the Bronx my watch said 3:57:00. I was still on my mark! How could that be possible? Maybe I could beat five hours? Six miles in a hour? Shucks. On a good day I could do six miles in .... wait a minute....six times nine minutes and twenty two seconds is .... the crowd in the Bronx was incredible. Everyone had said that we would see all that many people at the North end of the course. They were wrong. The sidewalks were filled and there was a huge balloon canopy over the street and band after band after band. And we are only in the Bronx for about a mile! Oh, the answer is no, I am not going to run six point two miles in 57 minutes. Not today.
But I am feeling good now, I know I am just crawling along, I can see the times on my watch. It's taking me longer and longer to do the next mile, but I am moving, I am running the whole way.
Running about as slow as anyone can run and still be running, but running.
We are on Fifth Ave now and headed South towards the finish at Central Park's Tavern on the Green. I ooze past 125th Street for the second time today and here is Marcus Garvey Park. Marcus Garvey Park is where I have been running to maybe ten times in the past two weeks. I make the corner after skirting around the park and there is the final stretch of Fifth down to the Park. I can see the tree I have learned marks the corner of the park and I head for it as fast as I can go which is not fast. The minutes are clicking off now. I just want to finish in fairly good shape, not look like some of the disasters I am passing left and right. There are people standing still, holding knees, stretching hamstrings, massaging thighs. There are people, good looking athletic people, walking, semi-dragging one foot after the other. As I pass the water table near the bottom of the hill at 110th Street I see a woman foldup like a falling sheet. Several people rush to her.
Now I am at the final long hill up to the Park entrance at 90th. Twenty blocks that I have trudged up again and again in practice, dodging the buses, darting across the red-lighted streets and squeezing my way between cars to get to the top. My wife and her best friend, and my best friend from high school and her best/boyfriend and my older sister and several others are waiting for me at the 23 mile point. 106th Street. Right in the middle of the hill, it will be so good to see real familiar faces, what a charge that will be, I tell myself. Go for it, now and look really good as you run past them all. (Man, oh man, my thighs are heavy.)
Just then, something really weird happens. The FIVE HOUR balloon Team Leader bounces by.
What? I could still get FIVE HOURS? How? What? WHa! I get right behind her. She is a blond woman about thirty years old and looks as if she has just stepped out of a Starbucks. She is 22.9 miles into a marathon and she is shouting at the top of her voice," Come on, stay with me now, you'll get to tell your kids you did five hours and you get your name in the New York Times." She laughed and kept trotting along holding the stick with the balloons over her head. She and the ten or fifteen runners with her were just a little ahead of me now and I gather everything I have, every fiber, every ounce, every sweat gland is put into action and I charge up the hill with them.
The next thing I know I am at 95th Street and still churning away at the hill but the balloons are drifting further and further ahead of me and I can see that I will never be able to keep up with them. AND....oh, crap, I missed seeing my sweetie! I almost turned around to go back, but I knew that would be a disaster for me. I really felt so bad to miss them all after they had stood in the frigid wind for so long just to see 39,000 strangers drift by, but, I kept going.
That last plunge after the team leader was not a good idea. I really had nothing left now and I was turning into the park for the final 2.2 miles. Luckily, I had run this roadway more than a hundred times. I know exactly where the road dipped and turned and I was really looking forward to zooming down Cat Hill for once. I was plodding along. When I look at the numbers now I am shocked. (At one race late last year I had done the last mile of this run in just under eight minutes. This last Marathon Mile took me more than twenty-four minutes.) I had to do a kind of crab walk down Cat Hill to keep my right knee from screaming at me and I stopped for a moment by the Boat House to rub it back into shape. Once I had it's permission to continue there was still the big uphill to make and then the little downhill to the South End of the Park.
Once you are on Central Park South you think that you are finished, but you are not. It's full of potholes and it's juuuuusst a little, nearly invisibly, uphill. Then you make that final turn into the Park again and there are crowds of people yelling, exhorting, pleading, cheering (Jesus, these people have been cheering for five hours!!! How do they do that??) And there they are -- the three little hills to the finish line. I suddenly feel as if I have taken a cold shower, everything comes alive, there is the last familiar bump in the road, there is the second one and now I say I say as I say in practice "Hill? What hill?" and I am laughing and running for the brown mat finish line and trying to look up and hold my arms up so I don't cover my number and screw up my finish picture... ...... .....
And then it's over. And I've made it.
Joe(Epilogue tomorrow or the next day)Nation
